The fatal shooting of a student and a teacher at a private Christian school in Wisconsin on Monday came as a shock even to a nation jaded by the horror of repeated school massacres.

The suspect, Natalie Rupnow, who police say killed herself in the rampage, was only 15 years old – but even more surprising was that she was a girl. Mass shootings by women are vanishingly rare.

Of the 441 mass shootings in the United States from 1966 to 2022, only 4.3% were carried out by women, according to research from the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a think tank.

According to an open source database maintained by Mother Jones, there have only been four cases since 1982, plus two in which women acted in partnership with a man.

In 2006, 44-year-old postal worker Jennifer Sanmarco killed seven people and then herself at a postal facility in Santa Barbara, inspired by what she believed was a conspiracy against her. Despite a long history of mental illness — she was placed on disability retirement in 2003 for psychological reasons — she was able to easily purchase a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol after a routine background check.

In 2014, former tribal chairwoman Cherie Lash Rhoades, then 44, opened fire at the Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office in the remote northern California town of Alturas, killing four people and seriously injuring two others. The shooting occurred during a hearing on their planned eviction from a property on tribal lands.

The dead included Rhoades’ 50-year-old brother Rurik Davies, 30-year-old nephew Glenn Calonicco and 19-year-old niece Angel Penn, who was holding her newborn baby when she was shot. The child was unharmed, a court heard.

Rhoades was sentenced to death in 2017 and remains one of fewer than 50 women on death row.

Rite Aid distribution center employee Snochia Moseley, 26, killed three people and injured three others at her workplace in Aberdeen, Maryland, before taking her own life in 2018. She had a history of mental illness, but her 9mm pistol was legally owned.

Another shooting was carried out by 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who killed six people, including three children, at a Christian school in Nashville last year and was shot by responding police officers. Police later said Hale identified as transgender and used the pronouns “he/him.”

In 2018, 38-year-old Nasim Aghdam of San Diego opened fire at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California.

The American and Iranian injured three people, one of them critically, before taking her own life.

Her confused family said she became angry at the video platform over policies they said were an attempt to “discriminate” against her, reduce views of her animal rights videos and prevent her from making money from them.

She legally purchased the Smith & Wesson 9mm semi-automatic pistol, police said.

A “deeply male act”

Women’s rights activists say the preponderance of men as perpetrators in violent shootings is inextricably linked to statistics showing that the victims are typically women.

A 2019 California Law Review study called mass shootings a “deeply male act,” pointing out that many of the victims of violent and fatal crime in the U.S. are women and are linked to a broader pattern of domestic violence and ideological misogyny .

“Even when mass shootings involve neighbors, strangers and police, women and children overwhelmingly pay the price,” the study says.

The study cited research from the campaign group Everytown for Gun Safety that showed that of the 57% of mass shootings involving an intimate partner or other family member, 64% of the victims were women and children.